Two or three hours after Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, the monument on Lubyanka Square commemorating political prisoners of Stalin turned into an improvised memorial and was literally drowning in flowers, and it stayed thus for the following week. “When I reached to put my carnations there,” my friend D. told me, “I had to stand on my toes.”
Here, near this particular monument in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service is where, until the coronavirus restrictions and then the invasion of Ukraine, we would gather every year and recite the endless list of names of gulag prisoners. Now, all such gatherings are strictly prohibited.
